The Contexts of our Prayers

When we think about the prayer warriors of old and current, we often do so with the mind to emulate their great examples: time spent in prayer, prayer through all hours, prayers of great magnitude, prayer for specific things that are then answered miraculously. We consider what they have done and transplant their practices into our lives to achieve what they achieved. However, there is an issue with this. We are unhelpfully taking their prayers out of their contexts.

The African church in the African culture looks very different to our current setting (although Australia is a multicultural place). Likewise, the Asian church will spend much longer in ‘prayer’ than I experience myself. But even within my own experience and within my own borders I have done this. When I went from my Pentecostal/charismatic church setting and denomination to my current evangelical denomination, one thing I made note of was the difference in prayer practices. We spent much longer in prayer and would pray more often at my old Pentecostal churches. At the time I took it as a criticism on the evangelical scene in Sydney thinking that we should pray more because they pray more. I’ve since changed my mind (not meaning we should pray less).

Consider what prayer is and consider what prayer does. In all these instances, if we transplant another’s prayer habits into our contexts, what we are often thinking is that, “if we pray like them then more prayers will be answered” or even that more is better – more time, more often, more volume, more words. It can become formulaic: effort spent = results. Our thinking can become skewed from the true purpose of prayer. Thus we must consider carefully what prayer is, asking ourselves, “who changes what in prayer?” How would you answer that? If we think praying more, and praying “harder” will make our prayers more “powerful” then I think we’ve missed the mark on prayer. All this thinking demonstrates our desire to change God with our prayers.

Prayer, however, is not changing God, but responding to God. As God speaks (disclosing himself and his will in Jesus) we then are responding to God’s will in dependence. At the same time, prayer is an invitation by God to join in accomplishing his will, that is, he has asked us to ask him. We aren’t setting the agenda, but God is. Consider then the ultimate focus of prayer is not the person praying or the action itself but instead the object, God our Heavenly Father.

Having this in our minds as we consider the prayer of others is a guard against our innate desires to emulate for the sake of results. Nevertheless, we ought to emulate the good example of others as it spurs us on to depend on God our Father more, or as it deepens our relationship with our Father in Heaven.

Consider prayer in our context. I think it is remarkable that in our busy age we Christians value prayer so much as to give up entertainment, and to give up the pressure of endless, urgent tasks in order to pray. We are goal-orientated, result-driven westerners. We can’t escape this because that’s our context and culture. But as we take those 15 minutes of our day to pray to the Lord, we are indeed doing a wildly counterintuitive action. Outwardly it looks like prayer achieves nothing as we sit idly and pray silently or scratch out our prayers to the Lord on paper only to turn the page and write up our practical “action plan” to-do list for the day. Instead, we might be thinking that 15 minutes isn’t enough. But that’s to miss the object for the action. On the flip side, perhaps all this shows the poor valuation of our prayers. The spiritual reality is much greater than we realize.

But then again I might just be justifying my busy life and lack of time spent in prayer. I haven’t yet read “A Call to Spiritual Reform” (or ‘Praying with Paul’ as it’s re-branded) by Don Carson. Check back with me later. I might have totally flipped.